[Stoves] Diesel as an excellent fuel for rural households

[Energies Naturals C.B.]

Crispin, Cecil,

what are we talking about? These numbers are highly theoretical!

We live on a small farm in a southern country (Spain).
Animal power is o.k. when you have to make transport works and plow, but for anything stationary, solar is unbeatable.

135 W of solar cost 70$ and work for 30 + years,more than 8 h/d.

A donkey cannot work for 8 h a day year round. Perhaps not even for half of them. Not only it has to rest and eat, but it must be bred, needs at least 4 years until it can really work hard and if you use it like that, it won't have a useful life of 30 y as some claim. And it must be tended, harnessed, cared for....

Ken has done a lot of work on gasification with small stationary engines. As for mobile applications there are solutions.

If there was a market for it, small high compression 2 stroke engines could be produced and make good use of bad gengas.

A small 1 cyl tractor of let's say 12 hp with a simple gasifyer could plow and transport during the day and make raw biomass into cubes for energy by night until larger solar power is cheap enough to replace it.This will be in a few years.
And new battery systems are coming, too.

I am very sure that that way we need less land to be set apart for energy than via animal power, without considering the animals' suffering!

Eating less but better meat, making good use of what we already have in the sense of advanced cooking stoves, local production and energy independence for small farmers can feed a much larger world than going back to animal power conversion.

regards

Rolf



 



On Sat, 18 Apr 2015 13:36:30 -0400
Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

> Dear Cecil
> 
>  
> 
> Here are some sets of numbers (per day) to save on a bit of paper (some are hard to find)
> 
>  
> 
> Donkey: output 135 Watts for 8 hours, pull of 30 kg.
> 
> Cow: output 235 Watts for 5 hours, pull of 50 kg, 0.5 m/s.
> 
> Camel: output 420 Watts, 8 hours, pull of 50 kg. 1.0 m/s.  The difference from a cow is that a camel walks a lot faster.
> 
>  
> 
> The donkey is the most energy efficient: 45% in terms of turning grass into energy.
> 
>  
> 
> In the Sahel cattle and camels are used for pumping water. Donkeys have been used in the Middle East for a long time on low power systems.  
> 
>  
> 
> Appropriately connected, a donkey should be able to power a laptop for 4 hrs a day quite easily.
> 
>  
> 
> Regards
> 
> Crispin
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Dear all,
> 
>  
> 
> I remember Wendell Barry claiming he sacrificed only 10% of his hill farm in Ky to grow the feed needed for his bionic tractors who did all the all traction work on his farm.  What’s more they harvest the land and fertilize it every year so the farmer does not have to waste him scarce time and energy planting, harvesting, and process his food in warmer climates (which has to be done in the colder regions of the world).  How great is that?   
> 
>  
> 
> There is a lot of work involved in planting, harvesting, processing, and feeding biomass into technologies that convert biomass into energy and energy into work.  So we need to do the cost/benefit assessments on the resources and work in and the energy and work coming out of the farming and livelihood systems.  I recall that big donkeys powered much of Middle Eastern Civilizations including pulling the chariots used in warfare.  These were bred for speed, endurance and strength like we bred gigantic work horses.  But it is hard to beat a mule when it comes to horse power.  As a child I learned a bit about mules on the remnant of my family’s plantation in north Georgia and they are pretty easy to work with and smelled great, seriously. 
> 
>  
> 
> Horses, mules, donkeys, and oxen use most of the biomass they ingest just to stay alive. As long as there is no constraint on land to grow food for animal tractors that limitation does not apply because they harvest, digest, and convert biomass they require and have more than enough to left over to perform useful work.  
> 
>  
> 
> The challenge is to efficiently and cheaply turn that HP into useful work using modern technologies  that pump water, grand grains, generate electricity, crush stone, mix feeds, make and mix fertilizers, pull wagons, cut contours, and level land for building, etc.  These are all tasks that today are done using electric, diesel, and petrol.  I would be interested in knowing the cost of the technology required to convert the power of “x” horses working continuously over 24 hours throughout the year to produce the different forms of energy needed to run an up to date modestly modern family farm: lights, TV, water pumping, refrigerator, plowing, grass cutting, feed grinding, mixing, hauling, etc. and how much land would be needed to feed the horse power required? These tasks will need to technologically minimized by reducing all tasks to the smallest loads possible: LED lighting, well insulated fridges and freezer, etc. 
> 
>  
> 
> And then of course we compare just how modern and efficient and smart we compared to modernized horse powered farming by comparing the cost/benefit performance curves on the same productive, profitable farm using income energies from horses and humans versus the present day spectrum of expensive technologies for directly harvesting energy from sun, wind, water, and biomass. It would be a technology race between different income energy harvesting technologies which compares the cost, human attention and work needed to operate a horse powered farm and family household versus a system of small scale RETs (renewable energy technologies) optimized for extracting work from particular income energies over a 12 month  annual cycle.
> 
>  
> 
> What about that??
> 
>  
> 
> In search, 
> 
>  
> 
> CECook
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 


-- 
Energies Naturals C.B. <energiesnaturals at gmx.de>